


One Day the Angels Called Her

by blackorchids



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Death Eaters, F/M, First War with Voldemort, Fluff and Angst, Implied Past Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Underage Relationship(s), Mentioned Off-Screen Abuse, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Postpartum Depression, Second War with Voldemort, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-14
Updated: 2015-11-14
Packaged: 2018-05-01 13:44:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5208080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackorchids/pseuds/blackorchids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Motherhood is <i>hard</i>, especially when your daughter is a clumsy menace. <i>Especially</i> when she's a brilliant, brave, beautiful, clumsy menace. And it's not like Andromeda has any good reference points to go off of, though her awful auntie Walburga might be a pretty good example of what <i>not</i> to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Day the Angels Called Her

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [Wizards_Vs_Muggles](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Wizards_Vs_Muggles) collection. 



> Title from the song _Mother, the Queen of My Heart_ , by Merle Haggard
> 
> Sorry about this.

When baby Cissy had been born, Bella and Andie had had to stay with their awful auntie Walburga, who’d spent the entire day lecturing the girls about how the only use they’d ever be was to marry a respectable pureblood boy and produce a pureblood heir to carry on the line. When auntie Walburga had heard that her brother’s wife had given birth to yet another daughter, she’d crowed on for half an hour about how the Black family line was doomed.

Cissy, in her toddler days, had found the story of her day of birth unequivocally amusing, especially when Bella’s theatrical side came out and the impressions grew shriller and more ridiculous with every sentence. The eldest sister would flap her arms around, shouting about heirs and family lines, and Andie would cower and cringe for effect as their blonde baby sister clapped and squealed in delight.

Andie thinks of those nights in their shared nursery, before Bella and then herself had been dubbed old enough for a proper girls’ bedroom, more than anything else when she finds out she’s pregnant.

But it is the day she’d snuck out of the house, after refusing to stop seeing her _mudblood boyfriend_ and receiving fifteen lashes for her _impertinence_ , that she remembers most clearly in the hours after Nymphadora is born.

Ted bounces their baby girl around the room, hushed whispers and nonsense words falling from his lips the way the snowflakes fall from the clouds outside, and Andie turns onto her side, away from the sight of her husband and daughter. She pretends to be asleep--is exhausted, after twenty six hours of intense labor--but her eyes can’t seem to stay shut. Ted’s shadow moves about on the wall she’s facing, his utter joy and love palpable in the room. Andie thinks of unflappable, powerful Bella and captivating, mischievous Cissy, and she cries.

-

Dora is a difficult baby. Her magic displays early, and, according to Ted, she’d begun shifting just hours after she was born, and every developmental stage that Andie has read about is reached two months earlier than expected. Dora is a difficult baby, not because she cries, and not because she won’t sleep through the night, but because she makes sitters uncomfortable with her copy-cat appearance tendencies and she gets into Ted’s documents and potions ingredients and she asks questions Andie is not prepared to answer.

Andie can’t shake the clench on her throat--spends every waking second in the tiny garden in her and Ted’s cottage. She pretends she cannot hear Dora’s cries, her eyes drift past her daughter in her little yellow pajamas with the ducks on them, she breaks a glass when Dora shifts her hair to something much too similar to Bella’s wild dark curls. She scarcely says five words to Ted every day, and hates herself for the stress she can see tightening his eyes and his mouth as he balances his two jobs and their new daughter.

It takes Andie five months before she’s able to hold her daughter, and that makes her cry too.

-

Spring is slowly folding into summer and Dora is shrieking and Ted has gone into work and Andie thinks that casting some sort of silencing spell is too much like how her awful auntie Walburga had treated her and her sisters when they were younger to even consider. She stares hard out the window, hoping that Ted will be back soon, but Dora’s had a set of lungs on her since she was born, Ted had said, and her shrieking is only getting louder and Andie’s hands are shaking, and her breath is stilted and she misses her distant parents and her sisters more than she can handle.

She’s already crying when she finally steps foot in Dora’s nursery, but her sudden and unexpected presence halts Dora’s shrieking straightaway. The little girl looks like her, wide dark eyes and chocolate-brown curls and a slightly-too-broad nose that Andie and Bella had always hated. Dora starts babbling quietly to her, lots and lots of different sounds falling from her lips, until she scrunches up her eyebrows and repeats ‘mu’ over and over until it’s starting to sound like ‘mumma’ and Andie _knows_ , she’d read dozens of books, that Dora is too young to really know what she’s saying, but she _is_ saying mum, and Andie wonders how long she’s been asking for her mum and being denied that basic necessity.

Lifting her baby from the cot is at once the easiest and the most difficult thing she’d ever done.

-

Things don’t quite fall into place as easily as she’d hoped after that, but the vice-grip on her throat and her heart lessens every day she spends carrying her daughter around the cottage and watching her roll around on the soft patch of grass in the garden and magicking away lumps of mashed vegetables from her drapes. She apologizes to Ted too, and he won’t have any of it until he seems to realise that she _needs_ him to accept it like she needs to breathe. 

Dora starts crawling, and her accidental magic has Andie boxing away every fragile item as quickly as she can manage, and the first time the baby girl shifts her nose into something not-human startles Andie so much that she drops an entire pan of eggs onto the ground. Which she then has to try and keep Dora from eating.

Dora graduates from crawling to running and from babbling to rambling and, when she’s four-and-three-quarters, she figures out how to turn her arms into wings and breaks a leg leaping off the shed trying to fly with them.

The Healer at St. Mungos recognises Andie and the unspoken assumption that she has taken parenting tactics from her awful auntie Walburga raises a few eyebrows, but then Dora knocks over an entire cabinet of Skele-Gro potions while she’s trying to demonstrate exactly what she’d done to break her arm in the first place and, really, it’s all Andie can do to rush the pair of them out of the hospital before anyone else gets hurt. It isn’t the last time they end up there, but Andie does become quite the expert in basic healing charms.

-

Sometimes Andie watches her clumsy, reckless, mess of a daughter while the beautiful little menace sleeps, tangling herself in her sheets so thoroughly that it takes her twenty minutes every morning to get out of bed. Her features relax into their natural state when she’s sleeping, and she looks so much like a Black that it makes Andie swallow tightly every single time.

The little girl snuffles and murmurs and Ted jokes sometimes that there isn’t a single moment in the day when Dora isn’t making noise and he’d long since learned to stay away from “talking since birth” jokes because they make Andie’s throat close up with guilt, but the thought stays with her for the rest of Dora’s life--that somewhere, subconsciously, she knows that her mum wasn’t around those first five months, and that’s why she’s closer to her father.

Ted wraps his arms around her tight and rocks her side to side for a long time after she tells him this, and she knows he thinks she’s silly for ever worrying about something like that, but she can’t help it.

When Dora is seven, she reads in the Prophet that the lovely Malfoy bride has given birth to an heir. She looks at the gritty picture of her sister’s son and the reprinted photograph of her sister’s wedding day and calls Dora in from the garden, where she is teaching the gnomes how to play exploding snaps, and sits her down on the couch. When Dora is seven, Andie teaches her that, in the wizarding world, there are some families who think themselves better than others because of their blood status. She explains that there are people who believe Dora’s daddy is less important because his parents are muggles.

When Dora is seven years old, Andie tells her daughter that family is more important than blood, always, and that, somewhere in the world, Dora has a little baby cousin she might one day meet.

“Your sisters are sore with you for marrying daddy?” her daughter asks, bewildered at the very notion. Andie smiles, closing her eyes for just a moment.

“One day they’ll stop being so stroppy,” she says in a conspiratorial whisper, the lump in her throat lessening at the sound of her daughter’s delighted laughter. “And, in the meantime, you can marry whomever you choose, so long as he loves you.”

That night, after Ted has gone to bed, she sneaks off to the attic and loots around for a long while. She sends Gert the barn owl off with her own goblin-made silver music box and Dora’s teensy tiny white silken baby robes with the octopus embroidered on the front. The owl returns without a note, but it also returns without the gifts, and Andie breathes deep.

-

“What house do you suppose I’ll be in, Mum?” Dora is asking excitedly as she bounces in place while Andie sifts through stacks of books at Flourish and Blotts, searching for the proper Level One Transfiguration text. “I know Dad was a ‘claw, but I’m not so sure I’m quite as boring as that--and I doubt Slytherin would take me, since they’re a bit uppity--no offense, Mum, of course.”

Nymphadora decides that Gryffindor sounds the best--and, oh, Andie thinks her parents just got a horrible premonition that something terrible just happened--and then goes on to lament the fact that when she’s called up to be sorted, everyone will _get an earful of the mouthful that is my name_.

Ted catches up to them when they’re in Madam Malkin’s, and when Dora spots him through the glass, holding a basket with a suspiciously fluffy tail poking out of one end, she moves to step forward, trips on the unpinned hem of her robe and topples off the bench into a heap. Andie tries not to laugh, but Ted makes no such efforts, his chuckling easily heard from outside as the squat, greying woman fusses with her ruined robes and her young patron.

At long last, the little family escape from the robe shop and Dora is so delighted with her new cat, Fern, that she nearly forgets they’ve yet to get her a wand. The wand is not so easily procured, either, but after Ted settles up with Ollivander, he declares an unquenchable desire for ice cream.

Three weeks later, Dora’s letter arrives in the evening post, along with a letter from the Deputy Headmistress. Dora writes that she’s been put in Hufflepuff and she’s pleased as punch, and McGonagall writes that their little girl has gotten two detentions for punching a boy who’d poked fun at her unusual name.

Ted frames both letters and they order Muggle take out for supper.

-

In her fourth year, Dora comes home for the winter holiday with all of her hair chopped off and Ted breaks a glass when she announces that she’s done messing about with boys because _they’re all brainless gits_.

“When did you start-- _being interested_ in boys?” Ted squeaks as he flicks his wand twice, repairing the glass and vanishing the juice. Dora scoffs loudly at him and stomps off to her room, shutting the door noisily. Evidently, she decides she wasn’t clear enough, because she reopens the door to slam it closed even louder a second time, and they can hear her throwing things around her room.

“We started messing about in my fourth year,” Andie reminds her husband, and the Slytherin in her feels some satisfaction at the way he abruptly blanches.

“Dromeda,” he whispers, and she purses her lips, trying not to laugh at him even as she crosses the room to hug him tight.

“She’s a smart girl, Ted,” she tells him, pecking him on the mouth a handful of times. “She’ll be alright.”

When Ted has gone to sit in the garden and mournfully sip his Firewhiskey, Andie pays her daughter a visit. “I just want to know you’re being careful, Dora,” she says, and Dora rolls her eyes so viciously Andie is a little surprised they don’t just pop out of her head.

“Nothing to be careful with,” the girl admits after a few minutes of silence. “He asked me why I don’t use my _weird shape-shifting crap_ to make certain parts of my body more preferable and I vanished his tongue from his mouth.”

Andie sits on her daughter’s bed and pulls her hand through the new, shortened hair. She waits a few moments, and then starts a story about her awful auntie Walburga, who’d sworn that the only use a pureblood girl had was to marry a pureblood boy and make a pureblood baby or two.

“There are more important things you can be than beautiful,” she finally says, because it had taken her years to figure that one out, and she’d been remiss in hoping her daughter wouldn’t be the same. “Brave, and intelligent, kind-- _funny_.” Dora is silent, and Andie can imagine her husband’s voice saying _for the first time_. “My beautiful menace,” she whispers, leaning down to press a kiss to the crown of her daughter’s head. “My brilliant baby.”

-

When Dora writes home in her sixth year that she’s the only Hufflepuff of her year that made it into Snape’s N.E.W.T.’s Potions class, Ted wonders at a former Death Eater teaching at Hogwarts. Andie wonders why it had been so important to her daughter that she get that single, solitary O in Potions. She finds Auror-training pamphlets stuffed in Dora’s desk and reminds herself that the war is over. Her insane sister is in prison, the Dark Lord had been vanquished by that poor little boy. Dora-the-Auror will likely deal with petty thieves and the occasional prat who has too much fun selling cursed objects to Muggles.

A handful of Dora’s friends come over for the first week of winter holidays, but Dora shoos them out when they start making noises about staying longer, entranced by the level of freedom Dora has in her house. She invites Charlie Weasley to stay the night and spends the following day with him in Diagon Alley, but comes home with three manuals and a nearly frightening amount of potions ingredients. Andie would worry that her daughter has been replaced with some sort of frightening studious replica, but she gets a letter from Deputy Headmistress McGonagall bright and early two days after the spring term starts, announcing that Dora has received two weeks’ detention for flooding the Slytherin common room. Ted laughs when he hears, and laughs again when Andie glowers at him.

“ _You_ said the sudden studiousness was odd,” he reminds her cheerfully.

“I bet she’s seeing that Weasley boy,” Andie retorts. She takes pleasure in his sudden expression of horror, particularly because she knows it’s completely untrue.

“He spent the night!” Ted garbles.

-

Pomona Sprout looks nearly as proud as Ted does when Dora collects her wizardry certificate and list of N.E.W.T. scores. The pride turns to resignation when the podium turns into a cow in the middle of Headmaster Dumbledore’s send-off speech. Dora has made it into the Auror academy, and when Andie hears that she’s the only one to do so, her pride outweighs her worry.

Alastor Moody is an odd, vaguely intimidating man, if one’s family wasn’t renowned for the Dark Arts. Perhaps _because_ one’s family was renowned for the Dark Arts, Andie modifies. When Dora had all but dragged the man over for dinner, he’d seemed utterly surprised that his clumsy protégée shared familial ties with Bellatrix Lestrange and the Malfoy family. He casts a dozen diagnostic spells on everything he puts into his mouth and gruffly announces that _Tonks_ isn’t the worst he’s ever seen, which makes Andie’s daughter positively beam.

During desert, he shouts _constant vigilance_ and Dora knocks over the table when she leaps out of her seat and into some sort of practiced defensive position, wand aimed at an imagined threat. He gives her a seven-out-of-eleven, his real eye rolling a little, and Ted stares openly at the pair of them while Andie tries to salvage her éclairs and repair her dishes.

When he leaves, he stuffs the rest of the éclairs into a small sack and stuffs that inside one of the many pockets in his thick overcoat. Dora asks if they can make it a regular thing. Ted pours himself a drink.

-

The year after Dora finally earns her credentials for being an Auror, Harry Potter announces to the world at large that Voldemort has returned. Dora is first in line to join Dumbledore’s second Order, righteous fury and indignation over her mentor’s treatment the past year only surpassed by her admirable desire to keep the world’s evil at bay. Andie cries when she hears the news, and Ted takes up wizards’ chess.

Dora tells her mother of having met _that fugitive Sirius Black--turns out he didn’t actually kill all those people, and, oh, isn’t he your cousin, mum?_ and Ted has that look on his face that he used to wear all the time when they were young and fooling around. The _what sort of family have I gotten myself involved with_ look. He kisses her firmly on the mouth when Tonks goes to bed, having decided to stay the night for once, in return for announcing she was joining a dangerous organization that would put her on the front line opposite a sociopathic mass murderer.

Dora tells her father about that boy Harry Potter, speaks with some level of admiration his relentless determination to be involved in the Order despite his current underage status. She’s more impressed, though, by the unwavering loyalty he’s got in his two best friends.

When Andie reads in the Prophet that Bella has broken out of prison, she throws up in the pot of some hideous plant in the corner of the clothing store she’d been browsing in. When Dora comes in through the Floo late at night, dirty and winded and covered in cuts and scrapes, whispering about how cousin Sirius had been pushed through the Veil with a Stunner, Andie can’t feel her face. It was Bellatrix who’d killed him, Dora whispers. She’d laughed while she’d done it, and she’d laughed after it was over.

 _Family is the most important_ , Andie had said, years previously. _Sometimes people don’t know that_ , she amends now.

-

Dora shatters all of the windows in the house when she finds out Ted has been killed. She’d been doing some sort of recon-spy work that was just about the safest her pregnant self could get without staying entirely out of the war, and Andie had spent two days sitting pureblood-ramrod straight on the couch when her very pregnant daughter had burst out of the fireplace, distraught over a fight she’d gotten into with Remus, who’d been prone to massive bouts of guilt over giving their unborn child the werewolf gene.

She hadn’t heard. Maybe the other members of the Order had thought it would be easier to hear from her own mother. She hadn’t heard, and so she’d burst into the sitting room calling her beloved husband a pig-faced coward, and it had been so remarkably _Dora_ that it had shocked laughter out of Andie, who’d been idly musing that no one had called her Andie in nearly thirty years, and, now, no one would call her Dromeda for the next thirty.

After she’d burst all of the windows, Dora had locked herself in the bedroom and refused to come out for three days. She did eat the food Andie left on trays outside of the door, but Andie was sure that was only for the sake of the baby. On the morning of the third day, Andie goes into a Muggle town to get Ted’s name tattoo’d on her forearm, and when she comes back in the evening with a gallon of ice cream and her daughter’s apologetic husband in tow, Dora is, ostensibly, cleaning the roof.

“Dora,” Remus is pleading, “You’re eight months pregnant--please get down from the roof.”

Andie decides to go and fix some supper.

-

She lasts all of two hours, sitting in her house, watching baby Teddy bounce around in his dark blue Babygro, strapped in some Muggle contraption that he reportedly loved. Dora and Remus had begged her to watch him, citing some important battle at Hogwarts, and Andie can feel it in her bones that this isn’t _some_ battle, it’s _the_ battle. She lasts all of two hours before she calls the names of all the house elves she knows Cissy inherited when their parents had died--the only sister not disowned or imprisoned (and, oh, isn’t that a fun thought--her parents must be so _proud_ ). Eventually, Trimble, ancient and stooping, pops into her sitting room, magic bound to serve the Black family stronger than her more recent Malfoy ties.

“Mistress Andromeda,” she says, with not some level of trepidation. “How may Trimble serve the banished sister?”

“It would please me greatly, Trimble, if you would care for this baby until I return,” she tells the same house elf who’d been in charge of keeping an eye on three young sisters, before they’d been old enough to leave the nursery.

Trimble bows low, her enormous blue eyes sparkling, and Andie thanks her even as she’s rushing to apparate to Hogsmeade.

-

It’s half noon when she finally steps out of her fireplace, dusty and aged something close to a millennia by her count. Teddy is standing in his conjured cot, and Trimble notices her presence and takes her leave. Andie takes six staggering steps to the couch and sits down.

She remembers the day Cissy was born very clearly--the vividness of the memory from how many times she’d helped her dramatic sister retell it. Even more clear is the day Dora was born--the perceived shamefulness of her feelings of hopelessness and loneliness. Dora hadn’t struggled to come to terms with being a mother the way Andie had struggled for even years after the fact. It could have been the war outside their door, or it could have just been their sheer differences in character. Front and center on the mantle is a brand new photograph of Dora and Remus holding baby Teddy close, grins overtaking their faces, all of them smushed close together.

Clearest of all is the memory of Teddy’s birth, not three months before. Her husband is dead. Her daughter and the sweet husband of her own are dead. Andie feels a single instant of pure unadulterated loathing for Molly Weasley for taking away the opportunity for revenge. It’s followed by gratitude, because Andie thinks she might not have been able to do it herself.

Teddy is standing in his cot across the room, with eyes so like his father’s and his ridiculous green hair clashing horribly with the red Babygro Trimble had put him in. He’s watching her curiously, and she knows that in a few hours or days, when he realises that his mum and dad aren’t back yet, he’ll start to cry, and she doesn’t know how she’ll manage to get him to stop when all she wants to do is cry as well.

Andie takes a deep breath and goes over to pick him up.

**Author's Note:**

> god why did so many people have to die in those damn books  
> come talk to me or prompt me on tumblr [@rosalinesbenvolio](http://www.rosalinesbenvolio.tumblr.com)!!


End file.
